The Boston Herald, Suffolk University, and NECN thought they’d hold a debate among the candidates for Mayor of Boston. But they didn’t bother to pick a date until very late in the game, because they are so important that, obviously, the candidates will show up whenever they snap their fingers.
Didn’t quite work out that way, actually. On August 19, the Herald/Suffolk/NECN folks told the candidates that their debate would be September 10, then backed away when they were informed that the candidates were already committed to a NAACP forum that has been publicly announced at least since July 31 (and probably long before). As David Bernstein reports, the consortium had simply waited too long to find a date that wasn’t already taken, so “unless they were willing to schedule on a Jewish holiday, the Herald was clearly going to have to go up against another, long-planned forum. The only question was which one.” So the bumbling consortium backed up a day, to September 9 at 7 pm.
Unfortunately, advocates for the arts known as MassCreative had long before – in late June, I am informed by MassCreative’s executive director Matt Wilson – set up a “Boston Mayoral Candidate Forum on Arts, Culture and Creativity” for September 9 – reception at 5 pm, forum from 6-7:30. By July 1, Wilson tells me, MassCreative had commitments to attend from seven candidates (Ross, Connolly, Golar-Ritchie, Walczak, Barros, Arroyo, and Walsh). Joyce Kulhawik was set to moderate, and by last week over 350 people had RSVP’d to attend.
Nonetheless, Herald/Suffolk/NECN seems to have assumed that the candidates would blow off the arts event and come to theirs instead. As WBUR reports:
Wilson added that a representative from the consortium was not impressed that the arts forum had been scheduled months in advance of the proposed debate. “They basically said this is the time we set up to do it and the time we’re going to do it,” said Wilson. ([WBUR] has not heard back from representatives of Suffolk, the Herald, or NECN.)
Joyce Kulhawik herself chimed in in no uncertain terms: “This is a truly nasty way to deal with the arts community in this town, and further evidence of the low regard in which we are held in some quarters.”
As it happens, things didn’t work out the way the Herald anticipated. Very quickly, four of the candidates who had already committed to the arts forum re-committed; in short order, the other three did as well.
So, in a wise decision not to try to answer the rhetorical question, “what if we held a debate and nobody came” (not quite “nobody,” actually – Rob Consalvo, who had not previously committed to the arts event, told the Herald he’d show up) the Herald conceded defeat and changed its schedule, moving its debate to 8 pm that evening. It will be a long and exhausting night for the candidates, since they’ll have a 90-minute forum at 6 and then a 90-minute televised debate at 8 (fortunately the two events are happening about 150 feet apart), but it does appear that both events can go forward.
One hopes that the Herald/Suffolk/NECN debate itself will be a bit better organized than the process that went into planning it.
Disclosure: I make a substantial part of my living in the Boston arts community, including with some organizations that endorsed MassCreative’s event.
I think the arrogance of waiting until the last minute and then picking a conflicted date and time is a tone-deaf move to begin with, and they damn well should have rescheduled “as they appear to have”, as soon as they discovered that someone else had that time already, regardless of whether that other group is perceived to worthy of their own forum. If the Herald picked the same date and time as one of the various Ward Committees or even a local Cat Fanciers Group, they should still pick a new date and time.
The title of this post should be: